In many environments multiple tools and disposables are used, including for example operation rooms, aircraft hangars, garages, and the like.
The central sterile services department (CSSD), also called sterile processing department (SPD), sterile processing, central supply department (CSD), or central supply, is an integrated place in hospitals and other health care facilities that perform cleaning, decontamination, sterilization and other reprocessing processes on medical devices, surgical items, equipment and consumables. These processes are required for subsequent use of the medical devices by health workers in the operating theatre of the hospital and also for other aseptic procedures, e.g. catheterization, wound stitching and bandaging in a medical, surgical, maternity or pediatric ward.
An operation room and/or operation theatre are facilities in which intrusive operations are performed on patients. CSSD, SPD, CSD, operating room, operating theatre are all considered to be part of an healthcare facility (i.e. Hospital) perioperative environment (the “Perioperative Environment”). Typically, multiple people participate in Perioperative Environment related procedures. For example participants during an operation can include all or some of the following: a chief surgeon, sometimes an assistant surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a scrub nurse, and a circulating nurse. Within the CSSD, SPD, CSD and the related workflows that are being conducted, participants can include all or some of the following: Sterile processing and distribution technician (SPD tech or CPD tech), Central sterile supply technician (CSS tech), Central processing technician (CPT), Central service technician (CST), Biomedical Engineer (BE) and other participants as needed. In the Perioperative Environment the participating personnel members use multiple surgical items, such as scalpels, forceps, and others, varying according to the workflow, reprocessing process, surgeries that are being performed and/or surgeries that are being prepared for by the participating personnel.
Intensive efforts are invested in keeping track of all surgical items and disposables, in order to make sure that no item unintentionally remains inside the patient's body, no surgical item is incorrectly packed and/or incorrectly reprocessed prior to additional usage. Therefore careful monitoring of workflows and processes relating to all surgical items are performed in the Perioperative Environment, including counting of all surgical items before, during and after an operation.
Counting the surgical items is a tedious job and requires intensive resources, including mental resources, personnel time and down-time of the operating room. Counting the surgical items towards the end of an operation also increases the time the patient's body is open with the associated risks.
In addition, counting is not always error-free, and in many cases surgical items end up being left within the patient's body, causing severe damage and even death.
Another problem relates to the life cycle of the surgical items. For example, reusable surgical items used in an operation need to be sanitized and/or sterilized prior to further usage. Other constraints may relate to maintenance operations required for the surgical items, for example, a blade may have to be sharpened after a predetermined number of operations in which it is used. In another example, surgical items that have been used in an operation performed on a patient with a contagious disease may require extra sterilization before further usage. Making sure that each surgical item is used and maintained properly also imposes expenses and requires resources, including record keeping and tracking, manual labor and the like.
In U.S. Pat. No. 8,193,938 to Halberthal et al dated Jun. 5, 2012 there is disclosed a computerized system and method for keeping track of tools, wherein each tool is uniquely identified. Identifying the tools is performed using a Radio Frequency (RF) identification transducer tag that is attached to the tools. The use of a computerized system improves the ability to track the tools and reduce system overhead. Generally, the tags are designed as passive RFID tags that function in the HF range (e.g. 13.56 MHz) or UHF range (e.g. 860-960 MHz).
In many cases organization use cases, boxes, sets and/or containers (referred to herein as assets) for storing and transporting groups of tools and disposable items. The assets may include metallic and non-metallic containers and trays. In the computerized system it is desirable to also keep track of the assets that are used by the organization in dealing with the tools and disposable items.
In contrast to tools and disposables, in the case of assets the tags are attached with direct contact between the asset and the tag. In the case of metallic assets the transmission signals received and returned by the tags are influenced by the metal of the asset. The various assets may be made from different types of metals, and have different sizes, shapes and thickness. Some of the assets may be solid metal containers and some may be mesh containers or combinations thereof.
Tags attached to metallic containers suffer from a performance degradation due to the induced currents in the antenna of the tag being cancelled by opposite currents induced in the metallic containers. The degradation level is directly affected by the type of metal, density and geometry of the asset. This causes a shift in the operating frequency of the tag leading to impedance mismatch, distorted radiation patterns and reduced gain. By adjusting the antenna used in the RFID tag the shift can be counteracted for a specific type of container so that the shift will not interfere with the performance of the tag as viewed by a tag reader. However if more than one type of asset is used then the organization would need multiple types of tags for use with each type of asset. It should be noted that assets that are visually the same in the eyes of a user may also differ in their influence on the tag due to various differences, such as the materials used, thickness and density of the metal.